Valheim Farming Guide: How to Plant Seeds, Use the Cultivator

Food is a central mechanic in Valheim. A varied diet determines your stamina pool and hitpoints. Aside from hunting wild game, such as deer, neck, and fish, you can farm and grow crops to make more potent recipes and meal combinations.

In this quick Valheim farming guide, we’re going to take a look at the survival title’s farming mechanics and why you should be equally as happy tending the field as you are spilling the blood of your enemies in it.

Valheim Farming Guide: Getting Started

Before you can start working the earth, you must progress to the Black Forest biome and smelt bronze in the smelter. You’ll be able to do this after defeating Eikthyr.

Once you’ve constructed the smelter with 20x stone and 5x surtling cores, you make bronze by combining 2x copper ore and 1x tin ore in the smelter. Here’s how to mine copper and how to find tin. You can find surtling cores in burial chambers throughout the Black Forest. 

After you’ve got that taken care of, you’ll need to forge a cultivator tool:

• 5x Core wood
• 5x Bronze

Much like the hoe tool, the cultivator is a terraforming tool. However, it allows you to till workable earth for planting seeds instead of flattening terrain.

How to Use the Cultivator Tool

To use the cultivator, equip it to your hotbar, look at the ground, and press the left mouse button. 

Make sure to give yourself a good patch of worked earth to plant in since planting seeds too close to each other can crowd them. If they’re crowded, they won’t fully mature — or even go bad — wasting all of your work.

How to Plant Seeds

In order to plat seeds, you’ll need them in your inventory. You access them for planting by equipping the cultivator, right-clicking, and selecting them from the menu that pops up. 

This menu also lets you replant grass for areas you’ve already cultivated but want to change back. 

How to Get Seeds

Presently, there are only three seed types that produce food in Valheim:

1. Carrot seeds
2. Turnip seeds
3. Barley seeds

There are additional tree seeds you’ll get randomly that can be used to replenish the forest after building your base area. These are: 

1. Fir (fir cone)
2. Beech (beech seed)
3. Pine (pine cone)

Carrot Seeds

The first seeds you’re likely to come across are going to be carrot seeds, which you’ll find in the Black Forest while mining for tin and copper.

A carrot seed plant will drop three carrot seeds when cultivated, but you can plant a fully grown carrot as well to make more carrot seeds. So really, you only have to find a single seed or carrot to get the ball rolling. 

Turnip Seeds

Turnip seeds are found in the Swamp biome regions of Valheim, making them a sort of a mid-to-late-game food item. Since the swamps are full of difficult enemies, like draugr, blobs, and skeletons, you’ll need to have bronze weapons before exploring these areas. 

Like carrots, turnips get planted in worked soil, and full-grown turnips can be used as seed turnips. Turnips can’t be eaten raw, nor can they be grown in the mountain biome.

Turnips, as well as carrots, are also a favorite food of wild boars, so make sure to protect your garden patch with some fencing, lest your harvest be devoured (unless you’re taming them, of course).

Barley Seeds

Lastly, we have barley. Barley is used in a number of late-game food recipes and will be the most challenging crop to grow. That’s because it will only grow in worked soil in the plains biome, which is home to many powerful mid-to-late-game enemies.

You’ll also have to convert the barley into barley flower using a windmill, which you can build with 30x iron nails, 30x wood, and 20x stone. 

Why farm

Farming isn’t necessarily a must in Valheim and comes with its own pros and cons. For example, it’s a bit time-consuming. Carrots, turnips, and barley take around four in-game days to grow to maturity.

You are also restricted from growing certain seeds in certain biomes. Barley can only be grown in the plains biome, for example, and you won’t be able to grow turnips in the cold of the mountain biome. On top of that, you’ll have to contend with boars trying to eat your carrots and turnips.

But the plus side to farming is the large food bonuses you can get from upgraded food items. Cooked fish for example grants you 45 hit points and 25 stamina for 20 minutes; all for 1x fish. But for 2x fish and 4x barley flour, you can make a fish wrap that gives you 60 hit points and 90 stamina for 40 minutes. 

It really comes down to your playstyle and whether or not you feel like you need to maximize your hit point and stamina pools

Hopefully, these nuggets of Valheim farming knowledge help get you an advantage over the many enemies the game has to offer, or at least the stamina pool to flee from them when things go south. If you’re new to the Viking survival experience, consider checking out some of our other great guides here on GameSkinny! And may your crops be bountiful.